M.2 and Cooling

[Brado78]

Hey gang, My next build is going to have a M.0 SSD, I hear they can get quite warm. would a case with a side intake fan be beneficial or would that create a "dead zone" near the drive with front intake and back exhaust fan?

Thanks Gang

Brad

 

[UsandThem]

A fan blowing on it would help, but it also looks like some manufacturers are building M.2 heatsinks onto the motherboards.

Another option would be to move the NVMe drive onto a PCIe add-in card with a heatsink like the KryoM.2. I use one of those and my 960 EVO never goes above 30c (it reached 58c when it was installed into my motherboard M.2 slot with fans blowing across it).

 

[HerrKaLeu]

buy one that doesn't suffer much from thermal throttling. Anandtech etc. have good reviews testing that. Use well ventilated case and you should be good.
A graphics card could create a dead air spot where the m.2 is. i have fans from the bottom as well, which should help. if you case doesn't' have bottom fans, a side fan may help. but you need dust filters.
I don't like side fans because when you open the door you have to deal with the fan cable.

 

[Brado78]

the new WD Black m.2 seems promising, but those 960 evo's seem way too overkill.

 

[UsandThem]

the new WD Black m.2 seems promising, but those 960 evo's seem way too overkill.

Depending on what you do with your PC, all NVMe drives, with the exception of the Intel 600p, are overkill.

However, whatever the price range you want to stay in, it doesn't make sense to buy a slower product when a faster product is the same price. For the same price of the new WD NVMe drive you can get the MyDigitalSSD BPX, which is faster and has a higher TBW warranty.

For example, let's pretend a GTX 1080 was the same price as the GTX 1070. Would it make sense to buy the GTX 1070? You might not "need" the extra performance of the GTX 1080 right now, but if you plan on keeping your PC for a while, it might eventually help.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Or you could overclock your 1070 as you contemplate the need for a second one later. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, and a price today will be higher than one tomorrow. The only way this is partially excepted derives from the market-power of the manufacturer and the ability to set prices among licensed "official" resellers of their product.

Excusing a build I completed for a family member couple years ago, and a replica of the original Sandy Bridge, this is the first real step up in five years with the signature Skylake. I must revise it to show the 960 Pro. I squandered money on an EVO for caching before I finally decided to buy the pro 1TB.

If I chose 2nd-tier parts (compared to a Hassy or Broadwell -E model with X99 board), I must satisfy myself that I have built the fastest (or near so) machine possible. so I will spend extra on the primary boot-system device to balance capacity and performance.

For someone with a more casual (and more reasonable) objective, you have a chance to balance mature SATA performance with one device (NVMe M.2) that would easily run twice as fast in many benchmarks for the low-end performers.

As to the cooling, you should investigate products like the Gnome Tech $12 heatsink, but you need to order more blue-foam thermal pads. Maybe you'll spend $16 and change on something like that. It should work with the motherboard M.2 slot. But either way, my own system offers an option to literally duct all my PCIE components through a duct-chamber with dimensions matching the 140mm fan that feeds it. With the KryoM.2 passive-heatsink assembly, air is literally forced down the grooves of the heatsink and exhausted with other motherboard input through a duct to a second exhaust fan.

I've tried to benchmark the temperature during stress to the NVMe M.2 Pro-drive, but with 5x of CrystalDiskMark, I can't get it to budge over 30C degrees.

Maybe I'll look into some more strenuous test. I can run Aida64 in two mouse-clicks . . . but that should be a milder test. I really wouldn't know for sure. What about RealBench? No -- that's graphics. . .

Any comers?

 

[TemjinGold]

Look into this thing:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11139/silverstone-launches-thermal-pads-for-m2-ssds

 

[UsandThem]

Look into this thing:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11139/silverstone-launches-thermal-pads-for-m2-ssds

I read that article as well, and it will be interesting to see how they perform when tested.

I'm not sure how well the thermal pads by themselves will dissipate heat, but Silverstone claims they can reduce heat by 10c+, so we shall see.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My NVMe's are both configured with the KryoM.2+passive-sink. The KRyoM.2 comes with adequate pads.

But if I wanted to plug in another NVMe to the mobo M.2 slot, I might try and use this:

Gnome Tech M.2 Heatsink

I think it will work fine that way. Unfortunately, my order came with only a 1"-square pad. So finding out about these Silverstone jobs saves me the web-research. They're taking orders at Amazon right now, expecting to ship by March 4.